I would urge folks NOT to vote for Jill Stein or for Cornel West or any other third party candidate, especially if you’re in a swing state. The presidential candidate that I think we should vote for is Kamala Harris. Because, while Biden and Harris and many other Democrats are guilty of heinous crimes, Trump is worse. He is, after all, Netanyahu’s and Putin’s choice. And they have good and compelling reasons for thinking a second Trump term will be better for advancing their aims. Jill Stein and the Greens can repeat till they’re blue in the face that Harris and the Dems are not significantly different from Trump and the MAGA Republicans. But Netanyahu and Putin are not buying that crock of shit. And neither should we.
There are at least four extremely illogical but widespread and often deeply ingrained beliefs that lead some to reject advice like the above and to support counterproductive third party spoiler campaigns:
One is the notion that running candidates who can’t win, over and over, is somehow an effective or necessary way to “build momentum” until they can win. But there is no evidence to support this, and there is no reason to expect that it would be the case, except maybe on an odd occasion in unusual, fluky historical circumstances. Because getting trounced in the last election is generally NOT something that helps a movement’s prospects in the next one! But it is possible to build a movement, through non-electoral organizing, and without running spoiler candidates, until such point as the movement is large enough to run its own preferred candidates and win. And it has been DONE, in very recent history, and it succeeded for predictable reasons, as other posts of mine on electoral matters have recounted. (See the discussion of the rise of the Reagan Republicans to power in Part One of this article.) And no third party dogmatist, and no socialist who opposes voting for Democrats in any circumstance, has ever presented a convincing answer to this.
Another is the mistaken belief, which we don’t generally consciously reflect on but that we feel deep in our bones, that our votes “mean” things that they actually don’t. We assume that voting for, say, Harris “means” that we LIKE Harris, that we don’t think she is a criminal, that we don’t care about the Gazans whose genocide she has helped enable, that we like her overall political agendas, etc. We assume that who we vote for is somehow an expression of our deepest self and aspirations, so that if we vote for someone who has approved sending arms to Israel, that somehow means we are genocide-excusing people who want arms to be sent to Israel. But in the current electoral system, and in circumstances in which no electoral outcome promoting our ultimate agendas and desires is possible, our votes CANNOT mean that the candidate we voted for is identified with who we are and our deepest aspirations. Our votes in these circumstances can only achieve, or make more likely, better conditions in which to live and continue organizing struggles than would otherwise be possible. And what a vote for a lesser evil REALLY means in these circumstances is that, in spite of obstacles, in spite of being hemmed in and given limited scope for achieving goals by means of elections, we are nevertheless defiant and determined to not leave uncontested ANY sphere in which power is contested, and to use our votes to achieve the best of what is possible to achieve by them in any given election, as part of a much larger and broader struggle that goes far beyond just electoral politics. If we had a system of proportional representation, then we could form parties with agendas closer to what we want to see happen, and we could vote for them without being a spoiler that helps the worst viable candidate on the ballot to win, even while we are still a small party. But in the context of our current system, and when we have not yet succeeded in building a movement to such a size that it can run candidates in that system and win, then the task that we need to focus on is in building our movements through non-electoral means, and building a consensus in favor of our agendas and visions, and using our votes in the meantime, before our movements have grown to a critical mass, to achieve the best outcome that is possible in a given election. We need, in other words, to DEMYSTIFY what it means to vote within our current system and circumstances. As Francesca Fiorentini of The Bitchuation Room podcast put it, voting is like flossing our teeth. It’s not special. It’s just something that we have to do, to achieve whatever limited goals we can by doing it, in a given election.
A third is that if we always vote for the lesser evils, no matter how bad they are, “they will never listen to us” and they will just keep getting more evil. So we need to “punish” the lesser evils, this notion says, by depriving them of our votes, even though that allows the greater evil to win. This line really takes my breath away. Because it implies that establishment Democrats, whose whole careers, in and out of office, have depended on the military-industrial complex and related lobbies and public influencing institutions, might actually “listen” to us someday, if only we vote for a Jill Stein. But our goal should not be for these people to listen to us, but to DEFEAT them. And it won’t matter if they listen to us or not once we’ve built up a large enough movement through non-electorally-centered means to finally be able to defeat them at the polls (and also to defeat anti-democratic coup attempts that many of these same war criminals will likely personally support). And while if greater numbers of leftists adopted the third party strategy, we might gain some temporary concessions, in rhetoric, from the major party out of office, this would not necessarily translate into concessions from the party in office which does not see us as potential voters. The surer bet, I think, is to do an end run past all of this by building up movements by non-electorally-centered means to a critical mass that can defeat BOTH evils, not only by winning elections, but also by paralyzing major industries through strikes, and similar mass actions, which is the scale of mobilization that it took to force significant concessions from FDR.
A fourth is the mantra that voting for the lesser evil is itself evil. It amazes me that so many Stein supporters, and Stein herself, can have really good and worthwhile things to say about so many issues (though there are some seriously problematic things as well, IMO), and yet be capable of saying something so insanely and transparently illogical as this. And somehow saying it often enough, over and over, makes it sound believable in her circles. But this happens to good people in all kinds of movements. It’s the power of groupthink that can make certain treasured but untenable tenets foundational to the group’s identity and members’ sense of personal meaning. Rationality may be applied to everything else, but if it challenges these core meaning-and-identity-defining ideas, it’s off limits. And so the absurdity is repeated over and over, with a straight face, with fervent belief, even though it is completely illogical.
But when there is zero reasonable chance that any other candidate is going to win, and it’s either going to be Candidate A or Candidate B who occupies the White House, voting for the one who you think will produce the least harms, even if both will produce great harms, is not evil. There’s a much stronger case for saying that the failure to prevent the greater evil from winning by voting for the only other viable candidate in the race is evil (at least in actual effect if not intention, and it’s the effects, e.g., dead bodies, that matter most IMO). Because the action increases evil.
What do you do if you’re walking in the desert, and you’ve run out of water, and you are close to dying of thirst, and you finally find a pond? But you know that the pond water has pathogens that will cause dysentery or other conditions which could also kill you. But drinking that contaminated water might buy you enough time to get to the nearest town with clean water and a medical clinic. You don’t say, well, dying of thirst is bad, but dysentery is also bad. Picking the best or least bad options, among the alternatives that are possible, for our and others’ sakes, is NOT evil. It’s the right thing to do.
I think we may need new language to convey what it means to vote for, and advocate voting for, someone whom we think is horrible in order to stop someone whom we think is worse. For example, in order to prevent the most egregious things that Trump says he wants to do and that his base enthusiastically would like for Trump to do, like massively increasing deportations of migrants and locking up socialists. (Both of which are things Harris might also do in given circumstances, but is significantly less likely to do over the next four years.) Instead of either “endorsing” Harris or “not endorsing” Harris, we need another term for when we enthusiastically urge people to vote for someone, not because we’re enthusiastic about the person, but because we’re enthusiastic about the project of accomplishing the best electoral outcome that is possible in the moment. We need a term that is neither “supporting Harris” nor “not supporting Harris”. Because unfortunately “support” connotes, to many people, that you like her, that you think she’s good, that you think she is on your side, that her aspirations reflect yours, etc. Maybe we could say “I tactically endorse Harris as the best possible use of my vote for our struggles in this moment”. But that’s long, and doesn’t fit on a yard sign. However we put it, it also needs to convey enthusiasm. Because doing the right thing, preventing the greatest harms, should be done wholeheartedly. Just as you wouldn’t hesitate for a second to drink the bad water in the circumstances described above, but would be glad to do it, because it is your best chance. So I will be wholeheartedly voting for Harris, even though I truly despise her. This is not contradictory. But our language makes it feel or sound contradictory. We shouldn’t be saying, “I’m going to vote for Harris, because we have no better choice, but I really, really hate doing this, and I feel really, really sorry for doing this.” Because NO, that’s not what we should hate. What we should hate is the genocide and Harris’s support for the genocide and other evils. What we should hate is the system and circumstances that prevented us from having much better viable choices. But we most emphatically should NOT hate, or feel like we need to apologize for, or have any regrets about, doing what we need to do, about using our vote in the best possible way that is available to us! We need new language for talking about this, a short way to convey the idea and the emotion clearly, though right now I’m not sure what that language is or could be. (Any suggestions?) But with or without concise language to express it, we must take as many words as we need to express and energetically advocate this distinct position/action with regard to a candidate, whenever needed, and work to make this a more common and wholeheartedly embraced and widely understood stance than it normally currently is.
The third party dogmatists promise a way out of the rut that we’ve been stuck in for so many decades. And it is tempting for many of us on the left to embrace this because we feel so frustrated at our lack of political progress over so many years, as the US and many other countries have drifted further and further to the right. In desperation we are tempted to cling to a notion like “if only we stop voting for the lesser evil, things will be better!”
And some, as they hear me saying that this is a false promise that is extremely unlikely to work, may find it difficult to really consider what I am saying, because they may feel like it leaves them without any alternative path forward, and therefore without any sense of hope. But that is only because they assume that what I am advocating is to just perpetually vote for establishment Democrats without proposing a path to build a political alternative.
Third partyists complain, “Well, this is what you guys ALWAYS say, vote for the lesser evil, because the greater evil is so much worse. And that leaves us at square one, or worse, each time! We have to break out of this somehow! So let’s vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West!”
But the truth is that I HAVE proposed an alternative path, a strategy for getting beyond square one, a strategy for breaking the cycle, and I am NOT saying to just vote for the lesser evil and do nothing else. But no third partyist has ever really engaged with the case that I have made over the past decade or so or given any kind of convincing answer to it.
I suspect that the alternative path that I propose hardly registers in some readers’ awareness even as they read me describing it, because it is so foreign to their expectations about how to accomplish change, because I am saying that we will not likely BECOME a viable electoral force by means of a series of failed electoral campaigns, but only by building movements and relationships outside of electoral politics that address all of life. (See Part One of this article.) And that feels counterintuitive to some, yet it is backed up by historical precedent, as I show in Part One.
The tendency of some, I think, may be to ignore the alternative that I am actually advocating, and assume that I am saying the same thing that others, like establishment Democrats, have always told them. Those Democrats are always saying, wait, the time is not right, be realistic, no candidate is perfect, our candidate is much better than the Republican, this is the most important election in history, etc. And the “realistic” center of Democratic politics always just gets worse. With Carter, with the Clintons, etc., it has continually drifted right.
But I am not saying to vote for the lesser evil “this time” and maybe try organizing an independent political force later when conditions are more favorable and the consequences of losing are not so grave. I am saying that we need to organize independently now, but doing things outside of the electoral sphere, which haven’t been effectively done by enough movements on the left for decades, to actually MAKE the conditions more favorable for advances in electoral and other spheres, and without which no alternative to the current politics of the two major parties will likely ever become a viable electoral force.
I am saying that in the meantime we should vote for the least bad viable candidate on the ballot in any race, and not simply pretend that we have a shot at running our own candidates and winning before we have adequately done the necessary work of making that possible by building a new hegemonic vision among a majority of the population. But that we SHOULD run candidates of our own, whether on the Democratic ballot line as insurgents, or on a separate ballot line when possible and desirable, not at some imaginary time that will never come when conditions just “happen” to become conducive to our winning, but after we have taken the steps outside of the electoral sphere necessary to make such electoral victories possible.
But how to build that needed whole-life movement beyond electoral politics? Maybe you feel that you don’t have any clue as to what that looks like or how to do that. I don’t feel like I know how to do that. Not that it is not at all being done, it actually is being done, on a variety of fronts, and we need to build on that. But my point here is that I think the evidence is that this HAS TO BE DONE.
And trying to move toward greater proletarian power, including but not limited to in the electoral sphere, while bypassing this difficult but promising process, as by running candidates before they can win, before they can make another party and not themselves the spoiler, is simply magical thinking, a form of denialism, a desperate response to frustration and despair.
Only strategies that can work can promote real hope. Magical strategies that are unlikely to work provide an immediate false hope, and that false hope serves as a salve that provides temporary and shallow relief to the pain of frustration, to the grief over seemingly endless failures that we may feel. But when such strategies fail, the resulting despair is even worse. And this can really break people. Many give up hope at this point. Some drop out of the struggle. Others turn to the right, to drink, to the pursuit of individual advancement within capitalism, or to whatever distraction from despair seems to work best for them.
The path I propose is daunting and personally dangerous, traverses territory that will feel uncharted to us, and is uncertain in outcome. And I am very far from feeling like I personally know exactly how to go about pursuing it. But, based on both history and logic, I think it is the kind of path that has the best chances, and is therefore a politics of real hope.
For years, I have felt like a lone wolf saying these things. Insisting, that is, on a path that pursues social transformations far beyond what social democrats and liberals typically envision, while rejecting traditional electoral dogmas, such as “never vote for Democrats”, that have predominated among revolutionary socialists with whom I otherwise feel more closely aligned. And I hate this political loneliness. I just feel like I’m forced into it on some matters.
But lately I’ve come across others who seem to be moving in similar directions. Hopefully momentum will build, and more and more people will feel emboldened to actually consider and engage with such views, and either refute or embrace them, or propose better ones, rather than simply ignore them or lob traditional slogans against them because they contradict revered and deeply entrenched traditions in their circles.
The Practical Challenge, In Brief
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part I
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part II
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties: The Really, Really Short Version
Why We Should Expect Trump To Be Worse